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Sep 24, 2014

Can San Antonio Police Search My Phone Without A Warrant?

Posted By
The Law Office of Guillermo Lara Jr.

The Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment, and the iPhone6

In June 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court answered an important question about
how to apply the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable
searches in the era of smart phone technology. In
Riley v. California, the Court held that when an individual has been lawfully arrested, police
must first obtain a warrant before searching the contents of any cellular
phones that they seize pursuant to the arrest.

Riley arose from several cases involving defendants being convicted of
crimes based on evidence discovered on their cellular phones. In each
case, the searches were justified under the "search incident to arrest"
doctrine set out in
Chimel v. California. Under this doctrine, officers are allowed to conduct warrantless searches
of the suspect's immediate area in order to prevent the suspect from
reaching for a weapon or destroying evidence. Police officers in California
arrested the main petitioner, David Leon Riley, after initially stopping
him for a traffic violation and subsequently finding firearms in his car.
The officers confiscated Riley's phone and found photographs and videos
that tied him to an area gang. The officers used the evidence of Riley's
gang affiliation to tie him to a previous gang-related shooting. Riley
was convicted of that crime and received a sentence of fifteen years to
life in prison.

Riley's case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, where the key question
was whether the arresting officers had violated his Fourth Amendment liberties
by conducting a warrantless search of his cellular phone. The Court unanimously
found that Riley's rights had been violated and that the "search
incident to arrest" doctrine did not apply to cases involving cellular
phones. A key piece of the Court's reasoning was that the digital
contents of a cell phone could not be used to threaten the safety of arresting
officers. Moreover, police can take many measures to prevent any remote
destruction of digital evidence, including removing the phone's battery
or placing it in a bag made of aluminum foil.

The importance of the ruling cannot be overstated. It answered an important
question about how to apply the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment
in an era of increasingly sophisticated technology. Smartphones such as
the iPhone, Android, and Samsung Galaxy are all capable of holding vast
amounts of data that in many cases contain sensitive information about
people's finances and personal lives. In fact, the Court's opinion
made several references to how attached American's have become to
their phones, even citing studies that found that a growing percentage
of people spend most of their day within a five foot radius of their cellular phone.

It should be noted that police may still perform warrantless searches of
a suspect's phone under the exigent circumstances exception—that
is, a rare emergency situation in which obtaining a warrant would be impractical
or dangerous. Additionally, even if police obtain a warrant, they may
find the cell phone's manufacturer uncooperative. The iPhone 6, for
example, is equipped with a new operating system—iOS8—that
states in its user agreement that Apple will never bypass a phone's
passcode encryption system without the user's consent. The language
of Apple's user agreement has led at least one law professor to speculate
that the new operating system effectively makes search warrants meaningless
in cases where a cell phone contains a passcode lock.

Don't let law enforcement take advantage of you. Any defense lawyer
has seen the rights of many individuals infringed upon based on police
using their ignorance of the law against them. The second police become
involved in any situation, retain the services of an attorney that can
help. At The Law Office of Guillermo Lara Jr., we have availability 24
hours a day, seven days a week. When you need us, we are here for you.
Call now!

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Nothing on this site should be taken as legal advice for any individual
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